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Wayne County History and Information

Wayne County was created in 1823 and formed from Ontario and Seneca Counties. Wayne County was named for Mad Anthony Wayne, the general in the American Revolutionary War and the County Seat is Lyons. See also Extended History for more historical details.

The Wayne County Courthouse is located at 26 Church St, Courthouse, Lyons , NY 14489; 315-946-5400 and the Official County Website is located at http://www.co.wayne.ny.us/.

Wayne County Borders Lake Ontario and Canada (North), Cayuga County (East), Seneca County (Southeast), Ontario County (Southwest), Monroe County (West) .

Wayne County Municipalities: Towns include Arcadia, Butler, Galen, Huron, Lyons, Macedon, Marion, Ontario, Palmyra, Rose, Savannah, Sodus, Walworth, Williamson, Wolcott. Villages include Clyde, Lyons, Macedon, Newark, Palmyra, Red Creek, Sodus, Sodus Point, Wolcott. Hamlets include Alloway, Alton, Angells Corners, Bear Creek, Bonni Castle, Butler Center, Desbrough Park, East Bay Park, East Palmyra, East Williamson, Evans Corner, Fairville, Fairville Station, Fort Hill, Furnace Village, Furnaceville, Gananda, Glenmark, Huddle, Huron, Hydesville, Lake Bluff, Lakeside, Lincoln, Lock Berlin, Lummisville, Macedon Center, Marbletown, Marengo, Marion, Mud Mills, Noble Corner, North Huron, North Macedon, North Rose, North Wolcott, Ontario, Ontario Center, Ontario-on-the-Lake, Owls Nest, Pilgrimport, Pultneyville, Resort, Rice Mill, Rose, Savannah, Shephards Corner, Sodus Center, South Butler, South Sodus, Sunset View, Thorntons Corner, Union Hill, Wallington, Walworth, Wayne Center, Wayneport, West Butler, West Walworth, Westbury, Williamson, Yellow Mills, York, Zurich . Town Clerks are responsible for vast amounts of local information from deeds, property transfers, and genealogical materials. Research on place and road names, the history of property transfers and much more are available through your Town Clerk. They are a tremendous resources.

Wayne County, New York History Books at Amazon.com
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County Court Records

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County Genealogical Addresses

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Family Trees & Genealogy Tidbits

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Wayne County, New York Family Books at Amazon.com

Extended History

Brief History of Wayne County, New York

Wayne County, originally included in lands of Ontario and Seneca Counties, became a separate county on April 11, 1823. The county’s history actually begins long before 1823.

Little has been written about the early Indians who lived in and around Wayne County. When the first white pioneers arrived in 1789, it does not appear that there were any major Indian settlements in this area. Rather, the Indian made hunting and fishing trips into this region where bear, wolf, deer and a wide variety of fish could be found in large quantities. Sodus Bay was a favorite fishing spot and a well-worn trail extended from its shores to the head of Cayuga Lake, where the Indians had permanent homes.

Artifacts found throughout the county, and especially in the town of Savannah, indicate that Indians, at one time, did have permanent or seasonal camps in the area. In fact, as far back as 10,000 years ago, Indian hunters, following the retreating glacier, moved into the area to hunt such animals as mastodon and moose elk. Once agriculture was introduced into the Indian Society, permanent settlement moved to the south of Wayne County, into the area around the Finger Lakes.

The Indians had an appreciation of their natural surroundings, which has become part of our heritage in the names which they used: for example, Sodus, a shortened form of the Cayuga work meaning "silvery waters" and Ontario, meaning "pleasant lake".

The French fur traders and Jesuit missionaries also made occasional visits to this area. On the banks of the Clyde River, near the site of the present village of Clyde, a blockhouse once stood. The legends surrounding it are many. The most authentic seems to be the one recounted by an early resident who places its construction at about the time of the French and Indian War. It was built, according to his story, for the protection of the trappers and missionaries. It was two stories high with the second story projecting beyond the first on all four sides. There is no record that the blockhouse actually figured in combat. During the Revolutionary War, the Tories had possession of it and used it for a station for goods smuggled in from Canada by way of Sodus Bay. A group of renegades, trap-robbers and other criminals settled near the fort and carried on a lively and profitable smuggling business until it was broken up by the government near the end of the war. Nothing more was heard of this group, and it was not until 1789 that the first permanent settlement was established in the area.

In May of 1789, two bateaux (flat-bottomed boats) carrying Nicholas and William Stansell, John Featherly and their families--12 persons in all, landed on the banks of the Clyde River just south of the present village of Lyons and became our "first" settlers. That same year, pioneers took up land in Palmyra and Macedon. A steady stream of newcomers followed, and by the early 1800’s, there were settlements in almost every town of the county.

The early settlers of Wayne County found land covered with thick forests principally of hard woods, such as oak, hickory, beech, birch and maple, with some soft woods on the low lands. The cutting away of these forests was a tremendous task, but it gave the pioneers a source of cash income at a time when there was almost no other, through the manufacture of potash from the ashes of the burned logs. An ashery was one of the first business enterprises mentioned in the history of almost every settlement. Although the tillable land has long since been stripped of its forests, there is still a fair amount of logging done in the county.

The land of the county is level or slightly rolling, except for the drumlins, long ridges of hills extending north and south, created by the receding ice sheet. It has a general slope northward toward Lake Ontario. From the lake southward, there is a fairly uniform rise to what is known as "the Ridge". This is an elevation extending across Wayne County from east to west and continuing on even beyond the state boundary. The elevation of the ridge, from 150 to 188 feet; its situation with reference to the lake; and the soil had lead geologists to the conclusion that it constituted the southern shore of Lake Ontario in the far distant past.

The influence of the lake on the climate of the county is reflected in the concentration of orchards in the northern section. As a result, Wayne County ranks high in the production of sour cherries, apples and pears. The agriculture of the county is greatly diversified with the rich muck lands contribution to the production of vegetables.

Some of Wayne County’s early arrivals were veterans of the Revolution who came to take up claims in the Military Tract. This fact, along with the story of the blockhouse, furnished Wayne County with its major link to the War for Independence, although a segment of the troops engaged in the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign passed through, or very near to, the southern edge of the county.

It is sometimes difficult to realize that in the not so distant past the greater part of New York State was an Indian country. As late as 1755 an Iroquois chief said to Sir William Johnson, of that territory which had been his by right of possession for centuries: "The land that reaches down from Oswego to Schanandowana (Wyoming), we beg not to be settled by Christians." The Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1786) recognized the justice of the Indian claims to this region as their property, and provision was made for the purchase of it by the white invading settler. In the compromise of the conflicting claims of New York and Massachusetts to districts now in New York, a line was drawn from Pennsylvania to, and through, the present Wayne County, west of which, Massachusetts had the "preemption right," or the first right to buy land from the Indians, the rightful owners.

Wayne County was evidently the joint home of the Senecas and Cayugas, who used it more for their hunting and fishing grounds than for settlement. There is no evidence that the Jesuits ever had a mission in the County; it is probable they did not. Neither have we any record of the French wanderers making any attempt to establish a permanent camp within the district, although Sodus Bay must have been a desirable harbor for them on their lake journeys to Niagara and the points west. This region was fortunate in escaping most of the horrors of the early wars. The Six Nations broke their agreement to remain neutral in the Revolution, but the result was, as far as Wayne was concerned, to introduce it to the whites. Sullivan's raid, the precursor of Sherman's "March to the Sea," laid waste the towns of the Iroquois from Elmira, through the Genesee Valley, almost to Lake Ontario. The returning soldiers of this army "relieved the dark picture of their warfare with descriptions of the rolling uplands and rich valleys-the Canaan they had seen." Four years later the war closed and the great hegira to the "west" was on. One of the first great land purchases in the County, the Phelps-Gorham, came about through the tales of Major Adam Hoops, one of Sullivan's aides. These men bought from the Indians 2,600,000 acres for $5,000, and an annual payment of $500. Included in this was a "mill yard" in the section farther west than the Indians cared to sell, but which as a favor they threw in with the rest. The mill yard was a strip of land twelve miles wide, extending from Avon to the mouth of the river a mere 200,000 acres!

To attempt to trace the various lines, grants and reserves laid down or sold at the pre-Revolutionary period would take too many pages. The old "Preemption line," the boundary fixed by the States of Massachusetts and New York, beyond which the inhabitants of the former-mentioned State had the first right of purchase from the Indians, almost divided the present County in halves, and was located three miles west of Sodus Bay. The new survey, made necessary by the fraudulent or careless work of the original surveyors, fixed this line as running through Sodus Bay on the north from Seneca Lake. The correctness of this line was not questioned, but it left a section known as the "Gore" in early documents which added to the difficulty in assured possession of those lands purchased before the opening of the nineteenth century.

The first settlers of the region which is now Wayne County located along the Ganargwa River, which was natural, since it was not only a fine stream for water power, but was surrounded by very fertile lands. Moreover, the stream was the easiest highway from the main road, leading west. The first westward road was one coming from near Utica to Geneva, and, with the building of the Cayuga Bridge, in 1800, was the road chosen by nearly all of the westward travelers. This highway left the Wayne region somewhat isolated and the person wanting to locate here came by way of the set of streams and lakes Iying to the north of this road. But it was only a few years after, 1800, that the "New Road" came west, passing through the County, opening up the fertile Ganargwa lands.

The first permanent settlement was started by John Swift and Col. John Jenkins, March, 1789, about two miles from Palmyra. In May of this same year a small colony made up of the Stansell and Leatherby families located at the junction of Ganargwa and the Canandaigua Outlet, calling the place Lyons, from a fancied likeness of the place to the spot on the Rhone, where that great city had its site. Williamson, the owner of much of the Gore, had selected Sodus Bay as the point for a future commercial center, on the idea that the lake and the St. Lawrence would be the outlet for the products of all this north country. In 1794 he had roads cut from Palmyra to Phelpstown, and made bold statements concerning the town he was to build and the wonderful prospects it had. The town was surveyed by Joseph Colt in lots of a quarter acre; a hotel was built; $20,000 dollars was expended in the first two years in improvements; Sodus quickly passed from the doubtful class to the head of the towns of the region.

The British still retained their forts on the northern border after the Revolution and threatened an invasion of the territory which included the County. The Indians were also getting obstreperous, and the pioneers were somewhat worried. But Mad Anthony Wayne gave the tribes a thorough whipping and the British moved back into Canada in 1799, so that with the horizon cleared the work of settling the region went merrily on.

Wayne County History and Information

County Court Records

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County Vital Records

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County Census Records

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County Maps & Atlases

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County Military Records

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County Tax Records

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County Genealogical Addresses

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County Church & Cemeteries

See Also Church & Cemetery Records in New York

Family Trees & Genealogy Tidbits

Extended History